If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and a Mischief of Magpies would be as small as a pea.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Arrest Of A Very Strange Man

The arrest of David Irving six days ago in Austria raises some interesting issues. Irving is a leading light in holocaust denial and historical revisionism. His claims about the holocaust and Hitlers part in it have been considered laughable by accademics for decades, only far right groups, to whom he now panders give him the remotest creedence. Couldnt have happened to a nicer guy I hear you say................

It would seem that in Austria and Germany, open denial of the holocaust is an offence punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Madness of course. Gives him the credibility and attention he's craved for years. Irving is a crank who's output has been discredited and proven to be little more than Third Reich appreciation and Hitler worship masquerading as Historical fact. It would seem that in an attempt to document the war from the nazi perspective he fell in love with his subject.

Is he simply practicing his right to free speech, or is he inciting racial hatred and helping keep the flame of Naziism alive?. Yes and yes..............The problem is, the moment you stop these people saying the unsayable it further fuels their pathetic cause. He has had a level of immunity from hate accusations due to his position as an "historian", but in the past fifteen years or so he has become increasingly unhinged and people began to see his true beliefs, untethered by the constraints of historical research. Take Irving out of the equation though and someone else appears to fill the void. I say leave him to be mocked and reviled, to struggle from year to year, from one neo-nazi gathering to the next. Leave him to his ad-hoc hypothesising and paranoid delusions. He's in prison already.

Footnote:The laws in Germany and Austria are long standing and Irving knew of them. His ego ensured that a call from"courageous students" in Vienna to speak before them would not be ignored. I wonder if any of his supporters and apologists have thought for a moment who these students might really have been........................

2 Comments:

Agreed! The real test of your belief in free speech is slime like Irving. The worst of it all is he will now be a martyr figure to the real nutters who think the world is ruled by a gigantic jewish conspiracy.

Just some cursory reading on the man reveals someone with a high intellect and many of the skills of a real historian, but his "mild fascist" nature seems to have overpowered his critical faculties and left his work, presented as historical fact, high and dry when it came to actual analysis. This seems to have driven him off the rails and into ever darker territory, until all pretence of objectivity disappeared.

A fine lesson to all those who would distort fact to fit their version of the truth.